By King Toine, October 10th, 2022.
The blogging community is more racially diverse than one might think. Internet-connected African-Americans are more likely to blog than their white or Hispanic counterparts, according to new research. While African-Americans as a whole are less likely to afford laptops and personal computers, Internet-savy blacks, on average, blog one and a half times as whites, according to a study published in the Journal Information, Communication and Society.
“African-Americans consume less online content, but once online, are more likely to produce it” said the study’s author, Jen Schradie, a doctoral candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley. While her latest study echoes earlier findings that blogs, website and video-sharing sites represent the perspectives of college-educated, Web 2.0-savy users, it sheds new light on the racial breakdown of those producing online content. On average, about 10% of blacks are likely to blog, compared to 6% of whites, according to surveys taken during that seven year period. And that figure steadily rose, with 17% of blacks likely to blog in 2008, compared to 9% of whites.
During that period, free online blogging platforms such as Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr, became widely available to the public. And while longer blogs have been eclipsed in recent years by such micro-blogging tools such as Twitter and Facebook, they continue to populate the digital landscape at a steady rate, the study notes. The study didn’t look into why African-Americans might blog at a high rate than whites and Hispanics, which Schradie says is a topic for further exploration.
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